This issue we inaugurate a bi-monthly department, “Public Affairs,” in which Hans J. Morgenthau, one of America’s most eminent political thinkers, will discuss leading questions of present concern. Director of the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of American Foreign Policy, Professor Morgenthau has also served as consultant to the Department of State and, more recently, has been associated with the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research. A frequent contributor to COMMENTARY, his many books include Scientific Man Vs. Power Politics, The H-Bomb, In Defense of the National Interest, and Dilemmas of Politics. His latest is The Purpose of American Politics (Knopf 1960).
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Two great Illusions have obscured for France the true nature of the Algerian problem. Their persistence has depleted the resources of France, contributed to the political and moral disintegration of France, and brought the nation to the verge of civil war. One illusion sees in Algeria just another French province, as integral a part of France as any other. The other illusion holds that the Algerian rebellion can be stamped out by military means. The illusory character of these beliefs is obvious to the outsider, but not to many intelligent Frenchmen. Nations, like men, need illusions to sustain them in their relations with themselves and their fellows, and most of the illusions are in the nature of foibles and, hence, do little harm. However, there are other illusions, such as the French ones about Algeria, which obscure a vital complex of a nation’s concerns and confound its thoughts, corrupt its judgments, and misdirect its actions. They are the stuff catastrophe is made of.
It is not only France which suffers from illusions of this kind. America has them, too. What has happened in Laos allows us a glimpse into the nature of some of them. And it is probably the most dangerous of our illusions which the events in Laos have brought to the fore.
It is tempting to look at the Laotian debacle as an isolated instance of misfortune from which we must extricate ourselves as painlessly as possible. Thus we are relieved of the necessity to search in ourselves for the causes of our misfortune, to revise our ideas in the light of the facts of experience, and to adapt our actions to the objective conditions. In truth, what has happened in Laos is not a self-contained local defeat which must be regretted but can be forgotten. Rather it is the first and for the moment localized symptom of a disorder in our minds which, if it is not cured, is bound to bring forth more serious symptoms and will in the end bring us to the verge of a national catastrophe of one sort or another. The disorder consists in two illusory but strongly held beliefs: that the Communist threat outside Europe can be countered by military means, and that the Sino-Soviet empire can be contained within its present limits by surrounding its non-European periphery with local military strongholds.
The policy of containment was eminently successful in the area to which it was originally applied, that is, Europe. It was this success which led to its transformation into a general principle of American foreign policy. What has worked so well in Europe was expected to work as well at the periphery of the Sino-Soviet empire in Asia. It did not work as well. It could not have worked as well because containment as a general principle of policy derives from a dual misunderstanding. It misunderstands what made containment successful in Europe, and it misunderstands the nature of the threat containment is supposed to meet outside Europe. The Soviet Union has never been contained in Europe by the military forces which NATO could muster in Europe itself. That the Soviet Union was or could be so contained has been one of the abiding illusions which have confounded the policies of NATO. The Soviet Union has been contained by one thing and one thing alone: the nuclear power of the United States and the plausibility of its use.
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The United States built its containment policy outside Europe upon the mistaken assumption that as local forces were containing the Soviet Union in Europe, so local forces could contain Communism outside Europe. Thus the United States embarked upon a policy, for which John Foster Dulles bears the primary responsibility, of collecting allies and clients wherever it could find them at the periphery of the Sino-Soviet empire in order to build up their conventional military forces. Laos is part of that collection. However, military power—nuclear or conventional—is incapable of containing Communism outside Europe; for the primary threat Communism presents outside Europe is not military but consists in political penetration and subversion and the use of foreign aid and trade as instruments of an expansionist foreign policy. The build-up of local conventional forces is not only useless but counter-productive as an answer to this threat. Laos is a case in point.
When the Indochina war ended in 1954, the two northeastern provinces of Laos bordering on North Vietnam were under control of the Communist Pathet Lao. The Geneva conference of the same year envisioned Laos as a neutral state with the Pathet Lao being incorporated into the royal army. That army was to be trained by the French. When the French pulled out, they were replaced by American military personnel in civilian clothes. This personnel tried to create a “modern” Laotian army. Its’ effort was supported by a total of $310 million in foreign aid. The infusion of such an amount of money into a poor economy, whose annual consumptive capacity was estimated at $24 million at the most, thoroughly corrupted the Laotian elite and created the very conditions of conspicuous consumption, demoralization, and popular dissatisfaction, upon which Communism feeds. In a country whose main economic problem is agriculture, we spent in 1960 somewhat more than half a million dollars for agricultural aid! The administration of our economic aid to Laos has been marked by inefficiency, incompetence, and large-scale corruption on the part of our officials and American contractors. The June 16, 1959 report on United States Aid Operations in Laos by the Sub-Committee of the House of Representatives Committee on Government Operations reads like a detective story peopled by crooks and misfits against whom a very few honest and competent men never had a chance.
Despite this American policy which blindly played into the hands of the Communists, the design which the Geneva conference of 1954 had developed for Laos remained, however precariously, intact. The country remained for all practical purposes divided between the Pathet Lao and the royal government under Prince Souvanna Phouma. The relations between these two groups ranged from sporadic fighting to friendly cooperation. The high point of friendly cooperation was reached in 1958 when the Pathet Lao joined the royal government. At this point the tenuous fabric of Laotian politics came apart.
The United States withdrew its aid from the new government and brought about its downfall. It shifted its support from Prince Souvanna Phouma, whose policies had been pro-Western in fact and neutralist in aspiration, to a succession of inefficient and unpopular governments whose main claim to American support was their vociferous professions of anti-Communism and their attempts to suppress the Pathet Lao by violent means. The shift was in the main engineered by the CIA and opposed both by the State Department and even some of the CIA’s own agents in the field. The shift resulted in a polarization of Laotian politics between anti-Communists and pro-Communists. Pro-Western neutralists, such as Prince Souvanna Phouma, and apolitical patriots, such as Captain Kong Le (who in 1960 staged a successful coup against the royal government), and all politically conscious elements not committed to the royal government, were now branded as pro-Communists and most of them became so in fact.
The attempt to replace a covertly pro-Western government with one which was openly so and had at its disposal an army trained and led by Americans, called forth a drastic reaction from the outside. While the clashes between the royal government and the Pathet Lao had been perfunctory and of a local nature up to 1960, the Pathet Lao now staged what amounted to a strategic offensive whose obvious goal was the conquest of Laos and the overthrow of the royal government. And while up to 1959 the Communist powers reacted with considerable restraint to the attempts to destroy the Pathet Lao and transform Laos into a Western military outpost, both North Vietnam and the Soviet Union now started in earnest to provide the Pathet Lao with supplies and technicians. As these lines are being written (early June), the Communist domination of Laos is virtually a foregone conclusion.
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What has happened in Laos has happened before and will happen again—in more important places and with more serious consequences—unless the underlying disorder in our thinking is removed. It happened before in China when we put our bets upon the most inefficient, corrupt, and unpopular group (hence the one most unlikely to succeed), allowed a one-time promising moderate group to fall by the wayside, and thereby actively promoted the polarization of Chinese politics between anti-Communists and Communists, which led to the latter’s victory. The same pattern has emerged in South Vietnam and is in the process of emerging in Spain. In both countries, we have identified ourselves with a regime that suppresses the opposition and equates it with Communism. In consequence, the popular aspirations for change tend to flow into Communist channels. The opposition tends to live up to the Communist reputation bestowed upon it by the powers that be, and the same polarization of political life which we have noticed in Laos and in China in the last stages of the civil war is taking place in South Vietnam and Spain.
The United States has of course no longer any freedom of action once this polarization takes place. Yet it bears the responsibility of having contributed actively, if not decisively, to that polarization by supporting those groups whose anti-Communism seemed to be the most reliable and effective because they appeared to be most firmly committed to the defense of the status quo and most ruthless in that defense. Emphasis upon military aid is the appropriate practical concomitant of this conception of the political problem, and since military force is the last resort of decaying regimes, military aid becomes also a practical necessity.
The emphasis upon military aid is still further supported by the assumption that a revolutionary situation, likely to lead to civil war, in a country close to the periphery of the Sino-Soviet empire, was bound to be caused by Communist military intervention. Thus when the Laotian military disorders flared up in 1959 and 1960, our government assumed, and acted upon the assumption, that North Vietnamese units had entered Laos in force. This assumption, fostered by the royal government for obvious reasons, proved to be without foundation.
This emphasis upon military aid, to the detriment of economic assistance, is being nourished from still another root: the absence of a plausible and workable philosophy of economic aid. To improve the lot of the Laotian peasant—the main economic problem of Laos—through economic aid from the outside, requires a subtle understanding of alien economic conditions and a delicacy in social and political manpulation far beyond the ken of most of the administrators of foreign aid we have sent to Laos. It also requires awareness of the political context within which economic aid is supposed to operate. Where that context is blurred, as it has been in recent years in Laos, foreign aid loses its sense of direction. Considering these and other complexities of economic aid, it is infinitely simpler intellectually and more satisfying practically to concentrate upon the military sector. Any army can be expanded, trained, and supplied, and you can show the taxpayer by way of tangible results what he has got for his money. If the army is too big for the population to support, if its training is unsuited to the terrain in which it is likely to operate, if its build-up is politically counter-productive—all of which applies to the results of our military aid in Laos—-Congress and the public at large are not likely to be aware of it.
A policy of military containment outside Europe is self-defeating in that it is a powerful factor in the expansion of what it intends to contain. Yet while in Europe our policy of containment has thus far not been put to the test because of the plausibility of the American atomic deterrent, it has been tested in Asia. It has unmistakably worked only in Korea, albeit at the cost of war, and for the time being in the straits of Taiwan. In Indochina it worked neither before 1945 nor does it work now. It is exactly this mixture of success and failure in the short run and the prospect of failure in the long run that threatens the United States with a catastrophe of one sort or another.
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In the short run, the inner weakness of our position in the territories of our Asian allies and clients has brought about the virtual loss of Laos, it acutely endangers South Vietnam, and threatens Iran; it may threaten other nations tomorrow. The administration has reconciled itself to the loss of Laos. Is it going to reconcile itself tomorrow to the loss of South Vietnam and the day after to that of Iran? If it does, it is likely to face a storm of indignation at home, and only a very courageous and farsighted President will be willing to face it. If the administration does not reconcile itself to further territorial losses to the Communists, it will be compelled to embark upon a policy of military intervention which can only have inconclusive results at best. Furthermore, insofar as that intervention takes place at the periphery of the Chinese empire, it is predicated upon the continuing military weakness of Communist China.
What contains China today is not the military power which the United States can muster in Laos, Thailand, South Vietnam, or Taiwan; what contains China is its own weakness. However, that weakness is likely to be replaced in the not too distant future by a strength which will make Communist China the foremost military power in Asia. When that moment comes, the policy of peripheral containment will be put to its crucial test and will face the United States on the grand scale with the choice between retreat and war—a choice which has faced us already on a very limited scale in Laos. That war will not be a jungle war but an all-out nuclear war. Once China has become militarily strong, it will be contained—if it can be contained at all—as is the Soviet Union today in Europe, only by the plausibility of the American nuclear deterrent. How great is that plausibility likely to be? And even if the Chinese government should consider it to be fully persuasive, how will it assess the damage it might suffer as over against that of the United States? It is upon calculations such as these, implicit in the policy of containment in Asia, that not only the success of that particular policy but the very fate of the United States may well depend.
It is disturbing that a policy which has such fateful implications is being pursued without an obvious regard for these implications. Some—myself included—have heard very influential and otherwise intelligent men, military and civilian, express opinions about our policy toward Communist China which, in their bland disregard of obvious facts and likely developments, were no less at odds with reality than the opinions of French generals and politicians who believe in the possibility of keeping Algeria French by military means. The very folly of trying to transform Laos into an American military stronghold at the borders of China without anticipating a reaction from across the border, points to a collective loss of the sense of reality.
Nor is that loss limited to officials of the government. The great mass of our people live in virtually total ignorance of the realities of the situation in Asia. Here looms the prospect of another catastrophe. The popular assessment of America’s position in the world is about ten years behind the times. The standards of judgment of the American people stem from the pre-atomic age and that short-lived period when the United States had an atomic monopoly. Nobody in authority has told us how radically the bipolarity of nuclear weapons has affected the position of the United States and how the further proliferation of nuclear weapons is likely to affect it, to what extent the commitments of the United States are out of tune with its power, and what changes in our thinking and actions are necessary to cope with the new conditions.
How will the American people react when they come face to face with the facts of life, not by way of a reasoned and authoritative presentation but through the unintelligible and, hence, misinterpreted experience of piecemeal reverses? The memory of McCarthyism should give us warning; and so should the political and moral devastation which France is suffering in consequence of its Algerian illusions. Yet as France owes its awakening from these illusions to the insight and courage of one man, so must America rely upon the mind and character of one man to awaken it from its Asian illusions. The President has a sacred duty to think deeply about these matters and, regardless of political risk, to speak with frankness.
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